In the past year I've reviewed four lightweight Linuxes for OS News: VectorLinux, Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, and Damn Small Linux. This article compares the four distributions. I invite your comments in response: what are your own experiences with these and competing lightweight distros?

Gentoo can be quite difficult to install: it takes a steady hand, strong familiarity with underlying Unix concepts, and the time it takes to compile everything.

However, if you only install what you need and you're willing to tweak the kernel to support just the hardware you need, Gentoo is incredibly lightweight. I've run a full Gnome 2.30 desktop with Banshee playing music and a few Epiphany tabs open - all with less than 200MB RAM in-use.

On the plus side, Gentoo includes incredibly comprehensive documentation that explains just about everything to less-experienced users.